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Grace Brown Gardner A Tribute
1880 - 1973 by Emil Frederick Guba, Ph.D. THIS WRITER met Grace Brown Gardner in 1934. He was escorted to her home by the late Grace Wyatt, then the natural science director of the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association. My interest was in the fungi and fungous diseases of the wild plants of Nantucket. He came to know Grace Brown Gardner even better by his research of Nantucket history which brought him to her home on Milk Street frequently to consult her volumes of newspaper clippings. Her hospitality and help were generous and most cordial. On one occasion she counselled him that the early grave sites on the island are burying grounds, not cemeteries. Correctly so according to the early maps and I accepted her information with warmth. Grace Brown Gardner wrote The Nantucket Flora, Chapter 13, pp. 245-268 for Dr. R.A. Douglas-Lithgow's book, Nantucket, A History (1914). It is a survey of the flora of Nantucket of different habitats and seasons and a catalogue of island plants following the nomenclature and classification in Gray's Manual of Botany, 7th edition. The publication of this manual in 1908 and the founding of the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association in 1902 stimulated the study of systematic botany on the island. The Nantucket Flora, Chapter 13 is based largely on Miss Gardner's own wild flower collections in her herbarium which she donated to the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association. This list of Nantucket plants of Chapter 13 was a great improvement over the first one by Mrs. Maria L. Owen's Catalogue of Nantucket Plants (1888). In the same period Eugene P. Bicknell of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden was botanizing on the island and publishing his classic papers Ferns and Flowering Plants of Nantucket, the first in 1908 and the 20th in 1919 all of them in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club (New York). Then in 1921 George Putnam's Sons came out with Alice Owen Albertson's Nantucket Wild Flowers. These contributions brought the fame of Nantucket as a botanist's paradise to public attention. The herbarium of the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association with all of the data pertaining to each mounted specimen is a treasure to natural science. It is scheduled for publication. The name of Grace Brown Gardner identifying her specimens will reveal her prominence in the study of the wild plants of Nantucket.
